


Too Much; Not Enough

by bananasandroses (achuislemochroi)



Series: Whofic [41]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Introspection, None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See, Pete's World, Tenth Doctor Era, The Metacrisis Doctor/Rose (sort of; but not in the way you think)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-17
Updated: 2009-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 16:33:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6291877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achuislemochroi/pseuds/bananasandroses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a failing of hers; a very <i>human</i> failing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Much; Not Enough

_Those three words are said too much. They're not enough._  
\- Snow Patrol

She’s been waiting to hear those three words from him for years. And in doing so has unwittingly blinded herself to the consistent way in which his eyes and body and voice telegraph her what she so badly wants to hear him verbalise.

She thinks it strange that a man usually so full of words should find these eight tiny letters so difficult. In her youth she forgets – if she even knew to begin with – that, for a man who has lost everything and everyone time and again in the worst of ways, to lay himself open to the risk of loss again is more than his hearts and mind can bear.

* * *

Time passes. Time in which the two of them grow so much closer that it’s practically impossible to know where the one ends and the other begins, time in which their relationship deepens and strengthens. The bond between them is dazzling, vital, and impossible to break.

* * *

Neither of them see the shockwave of Canary Wharf coming until it’s too late. And afterwards they spend three precious minutes on a wintry beach in Scandinavia, drowning in each other and talking about just about anything except the one thing each wants to say and hear. She manages to choke it out – he manages to mess it up. And she thinks that’s her last chance to hear him say it.

* * *

With the dimension cannon’s help and a dogged determination, she wends her way through the walls of the universes that divide her from the one she loves. If the Wolf also assists her on her way then she’s nothing but grateful for the help.

She finds the man she loves, the one with whom she’d sworn to stay for ever, and for a while it seems as if she’s never been away. He, she, and other members of the TARDIS family save the world and, with it, the whole of creation.

And her reward? It’s to be back on the beach, that one she’d hoped never to see again, reliving the worst day of her life with the man she loves refusing even now to take that last tiny step and say in words what both of them have known from their beginning. He’s right. On this one tiny thing he has always been right: it doesn’t need saying.

* * *

So when she finally hears him say it, but the new version of him that has a human life-span rather than the man she’s always wanted, something’s missing, somehow; something that had been there for so long that she’s practically taken its existence for granted was now gone.

* * *

For years afterwards, trapped together with a man who was the same as the one she loved yet who wasn’t really the same at all, stuck with the same earth constantly beneath her feet when the TARDIS coral failed to thrive in the new universe and slowly died away, she couldn’t get over the mistake she’d made. A very human mistake, too; letting the words take precedence over the actions of a man who, she could clearly see now, had always been in love with her.

For it turns out that the words she’d wanted so badly were oddly powerless, in the end.


End file.
